In the meantime, Necker, the recently reinstated finance minister, had published the royal financial accounts and the king had, in turn, removed Necker, who was much favored by people from all three Estates, from his position. Public demonstrations on July 12 championed Necker for revealing the king's profligacy. The next day, public gatherings turned violent.

The violence continued on July 14. Armed protesters had stormed a nearby administrative center, in hopes of obtaining weapons and gunpowder; as it happened, officials there had just a few days before moved their store of 250 barrels of gunpowder to the Bastille.

Defending the Bastille were slightly more than 100 soldiers and 30 guns, 18 of which were cannons. The group gathered outside the prison demanded the surrender of the soldiers, their guns and ammunition, and the prison itself. Governor Bernard-René de Launay refused. Negotiations broke out and came to nothing. A few bouts of sporadic gunfire later, the protesters had broken the chains on the drawbridge and stormed into the outer courtyard. Behind the inner gate was the governor, who proposed a cease-fire. At 5:30 p.m., soldiers opened the inner gate and the protesters flooded in, taking control of soldiers, weapons, and the fortress itself, liberating the seven prisoners in the process.

At no time did the 5,000 Royal Army stationed nearby enter the fray. It was troop movements that sparked the protesters, fearing a crackdown, into more violent action in the first place.

The death toll was 103. Only five of those were soldiers: One was the governor, who was killed by the protesters after an angry debate over his fate; one died in the initial fighting; the last were garrison officers killed by the protesters after the fortress had been secured.

The following day, the Marquis de Lafayette, who had fought with distinction in the American Revolutionary War, assumed command of the National Guard. In the days that followed, more and more members of the nobility, including the future King Charles X, fled the country. Angry Parisians began dismantling the mighty fortress.

While all of this legislative uncertainty was taking place in Paris and surrounds, out in the countryside the situation was anything but civil. In a period known as the Great Fear, peasants revolted against their masters and landowners, pillaging and plundering and venting many generations of frustration on their social and economic betters. On August 4, the National Constituent Assembly did away with serfdom.

One of the several important causes of the French Revolution was a stark economic situation. A succession of poor harvests had resulted in a rise in the price of bread, particularly, and other goods, and the poor, especially, struggled even more than they had in the past to afford basic things. The peasants who pillaged their lords' and/or landowners' estates certainly found short-term supplies of food and other staples, but that would not have been the case for everyone who had such needs. All of the political wrangling over rights and representation did little to deal with the still mountainous national debt and the still free-spending royals and other nobles. In response, the Assembly reinstated Necker as its chief financial officer and gave him a large amount of power to fix the situation.

One of the prime achievements of the National Constituent Assembly was the creation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, in August 1789. Helping draft this landmark document was Lafayette. Clearly inspiring the language and intent were the words and ideas found in the American Declaration of Independence. The overarching pronouncement of this product of learned counsel was that "men are born and remain free and equal in rights." This was a direct contravention to the idea that a monarch had absolute authority over his or her subjects.

Meanwhile, the women of France were having a worse time of it than the men. For all of the equality crammed into the Declaration, it didn't mention women; in fact, it specifically said men are "born free and equal." On Oct. 5, 1789, a crowd of 7,000 women gathered at markets in Paris and marched to Versailles, demanding that the king and the Assembly listen to their concerns about their plight in life. They also implored both monarch and legislative body to move to Paris, where a large population resided, rather than ensconce themselves at Versailles, far away from the still unsettling events in the capital. The women brought with them a considerable number of weapons, not only handheld ones but also a handful of cannons. Lafayette and 20,000 of the National Guard kept the peace, barely, but couldn't stop many of the crowd from storming the palace and killing a handful of guards. The next day, the king and his family agreed to move to Paris.

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